


Coffeeshop AU

by illumynare



Category: The Girl Who's Never Been - Escape Key (Song)
Genre: Alien Invasion, Alternate Universe - Mental Institution, Alternate Universe - Spies & Secret Agents, Alternate Universe - Steampunk, Body Dysphoria, Body Horror, Dragons, Dreams vs. Reality, F/M, Found Family, I guess this is a bit dark in places, Identity Issues, Incest, JAEGERS!, Multiverse, and a couple other stealth crossovers, because everything's better with Jaegers, but there's a happy ending I promise, for certain values of "home" and "again", which is consensual but screwed-up not romantic, you can go home again
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-20
Updated: 2014-12-20
Packaged: 2018-03-02 11:38:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,614
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2810753
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/illumynare/pseuds/illumynare
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No one's sane behind their mask. Alice tries on quite a few.</p>
<p>(Or: the story where Alice thinks there might be a hell of a good universe next door. It goes about as well as you’d expect for a girl who chugs bottles marked DRINK ME.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Coffeeshop AU

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Enigel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Enigel/gifts).



> This is a **direct sequel** to the song "The Girl That's Never Been," so if you haven't heard it, you might want to take a minute to [read the lyrics](http://vixyandtony.com/lyrics_girl.html). The song is based on Bill Kte'pi's short story "[The Cheshire](http://cyphertext.net/cheshire.txt)," from which I got some of the details for the alternate universes. (The aliens, though, were suggested by Enigel's prompt.)
> 
> While writing this story, I listened to "The Girl That's Never Been" 110 times, but I also spent a lot of time listening to "Three Wishes" by The Pierces, "White Rabbit" by Emilíana Torrini, and "Laura Palmer" by Bastille.
> 
> Offering this fandom was a last-minute "why not?" decision--I had never heard the song before scrolling through the Yuletide nominations list--and I not only loved the song, I had a blast writing about it, so a huge thank you to Enigel! \o/

**1\. and he faded**

—leaving nothing but a grin.

It's impossible. Alice stares, her heart thudding, her body shivering with adrenaline. It's only there for a moment, but it's _there_ : white teeth, just a little too pointed, and smugly curving lips. 

Nothing else. Just a grin. 

And then nothing. She's alone in the bar, alone and clearly has always been alone, because men don't hide yellow cat-eyes behind their sunglasses and they don't vanish into thin air.

"There's no such thing as Wonderland," she whispers, and feels the little square of paper wiggle beneath her tongue. She chokes and spits it out onto the table.

Of course. Drugs. He must have slipped away while she was hallucinating. Three months clean and sober, all ruined, because she'd been so hypnotized by that sexy purr in his voice—so fucking desperate to believe in Wonderland—that she let him put drugs straight into her mouth.

Alice has been crazy for years, but she isn't usually that _dumb_. Wearily, she picks up the sodden little square of red paper and turns it over. 

In blocky little white letters, it says, EAT ME.

_There's no such thing as Wonderland,_ Alice thinks numbly, and digs in her pocket for her cellphone. Time to call her sponsor. Time to get help. Time to be sane for just one fucking minute.

But what she pulls out isn't a phone; it's a stamp-like string of little red squares, each one printed with EAT ME.

There's a cold burn under her tongue, like the paper is still in there.

Call her sponsor. Leave the bar. Go back to her cubicle, to her AA meetings, to watching everyone else know how to be content in this world—

Or give the rabbit hole one more try.

What the hell. She always wanted an adventure. 

Alice picks up the damp little paper square and swallows it.

  


**2\. the mad descendants of a writer's pen**

—but not strange enough.

That's the irony of Alice's life: twenty-three years of being not normal enough, and now she's not strange enough. She can only shrink herself about a foot and she can't grow taller at all, which for an Alice is just pathetic. It's why the only missions she's been on so far have been simple sit-in-a-cafe-and-watch-someone stuff. And it's why now, when the fate of reality-as-we-know-it is on the line and half their agents are injured or stuck on the other side of the globe, she's still the one guarding the entryway to the tomb while Dormouse plunges inside to fight the team that the League sent in.

And it's why now Alice is going to die. Because Cheshire strolled into the room. After one very brave, very pointless attempt to shoot him, she dived between the rows of giant chessmen to hide, but since the chessmen are five feet tall and she's only shrunk to four-foot-three, she isn't hiding very well.

"I don't think we've been introduced, Miss Liddell," Cheshire calls out, his voice as smug as you'd expect from the League's best assassin. He's left a trail of bodies across all seven continents. He's why she is the fourteenth Alice: he killed three, four, seven, nine, and thirteen.

"Let's put it off for tomorrow!" she calls back, trying to think of a way out. But she can't. She's going to die, and then Dormouse is going to die, and then the League of the Caterpillar is going to finish their ceremony and reality will cease to exist.

"No," says Cheshire, right from behind her.

Alice shrieks and whirls. For a half-second there's nothing of him but the grin—that would be the half-second that she could, theoretically, punch him or run—and then he's all there.

That's how Cheshire is so deadly. He smiles and he's with you, no matter where he was before.

He's tall and lean, dressed in jeans and a leather bomber jacket. He looks entirely normal and almost sweet . . . except his eyes. He has bright golden cat-eyes. 

Alice feels like she knows them. Like she knows _him._

Those cat eyes look back at her, and she feels like he knows her too.

Then he grins and is gone. A minute later, Dormouse bounds out of the tomb, still in rodent form, gripping the ivory fan in his teeth. It's another Wonderland Artifact they can seal away, another step closer to making the world safe, and Alice . . . didn't do anything. 

She feels horribly guilty when Dormouse thanks her, and worse still a week later, when the Brotherhood of the March Hare celebrates another successful mission. After the first round of toasts, Alice leaves the rest to their tea-drinking and hat-throwing and slips out into the garden.

She doesn't like the parties anyway. Everyone else in the Brotherhood seems to take comfort in being around others with the same . . . affliction. But it just makes her feel more alone.

Alice looks up at the pale grin of the moon in the night sky, and shrinks a useless foot shorter, and sighs. Some days she really _hates_ Lewis Carroll.

Because in 1864, Lewis Carroll wrote a book.

And then the people in the book crawled out of it.

Nobody's sure exactly how it went down, because the first Wonderland generation didn't like to talk about it. They _wanted_ to live in the real world. They pretty much all married and had children and died peaceful, ordinary deaths. 

Then their children started inheriting their powers. It turns out that once there's an Alice, or a Dormouse, or a Cheshire in the world, there is _always_ one. As soon as the current one dies, another relative comes down with a case of the Wonderland. And it's not just a set of powers, it's a sickness: a constant, aching need that can't ever be fulfilled. It's a nagging sense that the world is too flat, faded, crooked—that it is somehow _not right_ and that you are _not part of it._

Alice had felt that way all her life, not just when her powers came. When she found out there was a reason, she was desperately relived for all of ten minutes. Then she found out that there was no way back to Wonderland. Maybe it didn't even exist anymore. Nobody was sure.

What they did know was that artifacts from Wonderland were scattered around the globe, they bent reality around them—just never _enough_ —and the League of the Caterpillar was a gang of Wonderland descendants who wanted to use the Artifacts to destroy the world around them and remake it into Wonderland.

Hence, the Brotherhood of the March Hare to oppose them.

There's a roar of laughter from inside. Alice glances back, sees the cheery faces, and Dormouse slumped over the table. (It's the drawback of using his power: he goes to sleep afterward.) They're the closest thing she has to a home, and they are not home to her.

Alice is glad, _really_ , that she isn't running around the globe murdering people and plotting to destroy the world. But she does wonder sometimes, what it would be like to have the tiniest bit of hope that someday this loneliness would go away.

"Poor little Alice," says Cheshire, and she nearly shrieks as the adrenaline slams into her chest.

She manages to stay on her feet as she turns around. "You—"

"I'm off-duty, for now," says Cheshire. "Don't worry."

She should scream. She should raise the alarm. But now she's looking him in the face—now she's looking at those impossibly familiar eyes—

It's just the Alice memories. She remembers her progenitor's adventures, the same way they all do. But that answer doesn't feel like enough, so she swallows and asks, "Last time. Why didn't you kill me?"

"Why is a raven like a writing-desk?" He shrugs. "Maybe I thought we were a little bit alike, dear Alice."

"More than the other Alices you killed?" she demands.

He nods towards the window. "Even among your Wonderland friends, you're still alone. Outside the world, looking in."

It's just a lucky guess, because she was moping alone in a garden. The League's cold-blooded assassin can't possibly understand her.

"Is this a recruitment speech?" she asks.

"No," he says easily. "I said you're like _me,_ not the idiots in the League who think they're going to find a rabbit-hole back home."

There's a strange, stuttering feeling in her chest. "You don't want to go back?"

"Let me tell you a secret, Miss Liddell." He leans closer. "There's no back. We never left."

His mouth is very close to hers. Alice's heart is beating in her throat.

_Stop,_ she thinks, but also, _I know him._

Their lips brush, and his breath sighs into her mouth.

The gunshot is deafening. Cheshire blinks, and smiles faintly, and then slumps forward and falls into her arms. Alice staggers and goes to her knees.

Behind her stands the Duchess, twirling her pearl-handled revolver.

"Couldn't have done it without you," she says. "Good work distracting him, kid."

He's still warm, but not breathing. There's blood all over her.

_He nearly killed me,_ she tells herself. _He was going to kill me._

But he was the first person who had ever seen how _much_ she was alone. She thinks about him again and again.

One day she has a dream, and when she wakes up there's a strip of little red squares underneath her pillow. EAT ME EAT ME EAT ME EAT ME EAT ME EAT ME EAT ME EAT ME EAT ME, they say in a neat little line, and as Alice stares at them, she feels a slow drumbeat of half-remembered hope.

She thinks, _I wish I could meet him and not have to care about anything else._

And she eats another square.

  


**3\. are we long-lost orphaned kin?**

"—the _best_ butter," says Lady Buxton, and Alice flinches in her chair. But there is no Hatter, no Dormouse, no March Hare: she's drinking tea, but with the ladies of high society, on the observation deck of the luxury airship _Olympus_. Lady Wenderly is only talking about the delicious scones her new cook is able to create.

"Dear Jeanine!" says Miss Draper in her soft, buttery voice. "You look so pale. Are you quite all right?"

"Of course," says Alice, who has learned to answer to her name even if she still can't believe it's hers. "Thank you." She pinches a corner off her tea-cake but doesn't eat it. She never wants to eat at these parties. Everything is fake, fake as the mechanical butlers serving them tea, and she smiles a little as she imagines the ladies around her going _whirr_ and _click._

(Sometimes Alice thinks that she is a mechanical, and her gears have slipped and turned to the side. It would explain a few things. Or she's just mad.)

"I can't imagine how you bring yourself to sit up here, cool as a cucumber," says Lady Buxton. " _I_ was never in an airship crash, and I'm petrified." She takes a bite of her tea-cake, looking entirely at ease.

"Diana!" protests Lady Beresford. "You'll upset her."

It's well known that Jeanine Liddell is both peculiar and delicate. 

"I don't mind," says Alice. "I don't remember it."

She doesn't.

She knows what happened: when she was sixteen years old, her father took her and Jamie for a flight on his company's newest airship. That evening, they sat in their private lounge and he read to them from their favorite book, _Alice's Adventures in Wonderland_. And then the airship's steam-engine exploded. Of one hundred thirty-nine people, only the newly-orphaned twins survived. Miraculously, they had hardly a scratch on them—but the terror and grief caused both of them to lose their memories.

It took two terrible years to convince their guardians and solicitors that despite their incurable amnesia—despite their terrified nonsense babbling when they were pulled from the wreckage—they were not insane. That Jamie was as brilliant with machines as he ever was, and Alice as brilliant with checking the figures in the books, and that they both should be allowed to inherit Father's company as he always wished. It's still a battle, which is why she's choking down her tea right now with ladies she despises.

Alice knows what happened. And she remembers falling. But not out of the sky, amid screams and fire. She remembers falling down an endless tunnel, past a jar of orange marmalade, and into Wonderland. She remembers swimming through her own tears, racing the Dodo, attending the tea-party. And she remembers meeting him in the dark woods: Cheshire, her Cheshire, her dark-haired boy with his golden cat-eyes and wide, wicked grin. He cupped her chin and kissed her—

That wasn't in the book. That was not in the book that Father had read to them as children; she knew, because she kept checking. And the book was always the same.

Everything always changed in Wonderland. EAT ME. DRINK ME. One side makes you grow taller. One side makes you small.

One day she knows she is really Alice, and all she needs is to get back to Wonderland. One day she's still Jeanine.

Today she's both, but mostly Alice, and this tea-party is the most boring thing in the world. She goes on smiling and nodding and muttering polite phrases that honestly don't make any more sense than "mimsy were the borogoves." Wonderland was certainly good practice for high society.

She misses Wonderland so much. 

Finally it's over, and she's able to escape back to her room. On board the _Olympus_ , she and Jamie share a double suite with a little door collecting the bedrooms. She's not surprised to find him sitting on the edge of her bed: he always comes here when he's upset.

"I hate society," he says viciously. He's wearing one of his finest suits.

"Me too," she agrees, with a sigh. "Meeting with investors?"

He nods, not meeting her eyes. His shoulders are hunched, his hands clenched. Suddenly he lets out a little choked breath and starts desperately licking at his palm.

In both their memories, he isn't Jamie and he isn't human. He's Cheshire, who shifts between cat and human form every few minutes. Alice sometimes envies the freedom he has in their life now, but she knows that in the end, she's the luckier of them. At least her body is still the shape she remembers.

Lick, lick, lick. He rubs his hand over his face and hair, and then he goes back to licking it, faster and faster. 

He's going to start biting at his hands soon. He's told her how it feels: like the paws are just under his skin, and if he could tear them free, his body would be right again.

It won't work. He's not really a cat. (She's not really Alice.) So she distracts him the only way she knows how: she sits beside him, pulls his hand away from his mouth and kisses him. (She's not really his sister.)

It's delicious and wretched and insane, and he kisses her back. She thinks, _We're all mad here,_ and when he chuckles, she realizes that she said it out loud. 

"I'm mad," he says. "You're mad." 

"How do you know I'm mad?" says Alice, and the familiar words are comforting as a lullaby, sweet as a drug.

"You must be," he says. "You're here." And he's definitely Cheshire now, _her_ Cheshire, and she's definitely Alice as she kisses him again. 

One kiss leads to another kiss. And then to more than kissing. 

Afterwards, they don't talk. Jamie dresses and leaves in silence, while she curls miserably in the bed. 

Right now, she feels like his sister. She always does, when it's most unforgivable to be his sister. 

It's been years. Nothing is going to stop this need between them, or the slow insanity of their mismatched memories, or the way every moment in their lives is sick and fake. Pretending to be Jeanine, pretending to be Alice. Sometimes when she's alone, she can convince herself that she's really one or the other, but as soon as she sees him—she remembers both.

_This isn't what I wanted,_ she thinks.

There's a paper square in her hand and it says EAT ME.

She swallows the little paper, and it's bitter, bitter, bitter, as she thinks, _I don't want him to matter anymore_.

  


**4\. outside the world looking in**

—but he thinks that she's human.

So it doesn't mean anything when Chester brings flowers to her cubicle, or when he grins and asks her out on a date, or when he kisses her afterwards.

He's pretty good with his tongue, actually, but it's not impressive for somebody whose true form has sixteen black tentacles, each four feet long.

Alice leans against the wall and idly kisses him back. Her whole body aches with the desire to shift back into her true form. But she can't shift here. She literally can't, because the Red Queen's archons locked her form before she left the Hive. Until she finishes her mission, she's stuck in this lumbering human form.

Which apparently wants to mate with him. The hormones in this body are functioning pretty well, huh.

So that's how Alice—whose real name can't be pronounced with human vocal cords—gets a human boyfriend. It's useful because Chester helps run the security for the satellite systems that she's supposed to be hacking, and between looking over his shoulder and logging into his computer when he's asleep, she gets a few hints that she might not have otherwise.

The other women at the office seem to think it makes her more like them; they invite her to movie nights and parties more often. Alice stares at them from behind her stiff, expressionless face and says no. She isn't sure what their response means. Of course she is genetically superior to them: the smallest hatchling in the Hive is. But there's a subtle language in human vocal tones, in the flutter of their hands and the shift of their stances, that she's never been able to fully decipher or replicate.

Alice misses her Hive-sisters. She misses the gentle, firm pressure of one tentacle against another and the quick secretion of enzymes that sink into her skin and convey the _exact_ emotion her sisters want to tell her. She misses the steady telepathic drumbeat of the Red Queen's will in her head. She misses not being alone.

All that will end soon. Until then—

Chester is strangely comforting, sometimes. 

It's not that he understands her more than anyone else in the human world. But he's obsessed with a pair of books about another Alice, a girl who travels to a nonsense Wonderland, where everything is just as strange and confusing as the human race. He nicknames people at the office Mad Hatter and Dormouse and Mock Turtle—the system administrator is the Queen of Hearts—and every time it rains, he grins at her and says, "'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves—"

"Did gyre and gimble in the wabe," Alice finishes emotionlessly. She has learned to finish all his quotes. 

In nonsense, they are not quite so alien to each other. (It doesn't matter.)

One dull, rainy afternoon, Alice finishes inserting the virus into the satellites. They will have control of the human communication network, when they need it. When the time comes for the true invasion.

She stares out the window at the rain spattering over the cement of the city, the glass and the steel, and tries to imagine it. The tall spikes of the skyscrapers will crumple like tinfoil. The humans will swarm out of their buildings like ants, and die just as easily. This world will belong to the Hive, just like a thousand worlds before it.

Behind her, Dormouse and Mock Turtle—Chester's names are easier to remember than their human labels—keep droning about a movie they want to watch. The Queen of Hearts is snapping at somebody over the phone.

"Keeping my seat warm?" says Chester, appearing behind her. She's about to stand, but then his arms wrap around her shoulders from behind, and his mouth presses into the back of her head. He huffs out a warm breath into her hair.

She feels wrong. There's warmth around her, and that's pleasant, but her body feels strangely hollow. Still. 

It's not trying to change back. For the first time she can remember, her true form doesn't press at the inside of her skin. It's almost as if she's content to be human, and her throat constricts and heart beats fast with human-flavored panic.

She contacts the Hive that night. She says, _I am done. I am ready to come home._

They say, _Bring a human specimen._

So she brings Chester.

It's fitting. He helped her access the satellites, he can help her with this. And once the archons have restored her body and torn his apart, she'll forget him and that sickening moment when she didn't mind being like him.

Except the archons tell her that they can't restore her form instantly; they have released the lock, but it must loosen its hold on her gradually. And she is ordered to help with the experiments. 

She has assisted here before, among the glaring white lights and the pulsing red veins of the machinery. She knows what to expect: fear, denial, fury. Screams, pleading, prayers. In the end, despair.

She labels him Specimen CH11101 and she is ready for anything he does.

CH11101 does scream sometimes. But mostly he watches her from under half-lowered lids. And her back is turned, he laughs in dry, wild snickers.

Finally she breaks down and asks him, "Why are you laughing?"

His grin slices wide, wider than it should be. His eyes have turned yellow, the pupils have stretched narrow and cat-like. They haven't been able to make him grow any tentacles yet, but there are some promising dark gray buds poking out of his left shoulder.

"Because," he rasps, "you are. And you're not. And I am too." Then he closes his eyes and sighs.

"That makes no sense," she says.

CH11101 does not react.

"We may succeed in making you one of us," she tells him. "You will be useful then."

He's not moving.

He's not moving and he's not breathing and _he's not supposed to matter._

But her throat has gone tight and her breaths are quick and shuddering. It matches the description of human grief. She doesn't want it but it won't stop.

He is Specimen CH11101 and he's an experiment for the glory of the Red Queen and the Hive. They will use the data to further develop their infiltration program. Soon this world will be colonized. Soon the human race will cease to exist.

She feels her tentacles move. She sees them shift and bulge under her skin. They make her sick. She wants them out.

There's a little strip of red squares in her hand. 

  


**5\. no one's sane behind their mask**

—tick tock.

Alice likes listening to the little plastic clock by her bedside table. Most sounds are too loud, too chaotic. They make her skin shiver and itch. But the clock? She sits in her bed and listens, and it's orderly and safe.

Tick tick tock. She ticks off the facts about herself in time with the clock.

She is

(1) in a mental hospital

(2) definitely crazy

(3) better off here. better off. better off. get off get off get _out—_

(4) yes, really, seriously crazy

(5) because she does not have sticky black tentacles writhing under her skin and whispering that they want to drink blood, that they come from the stars and she does too and it is time for the Earth to burn.

(6) she really, really doesn't.

(7) and sometimes, down the hallway or across, she sees specimen CH11101 (not his name) and he's okay. He's crazy, obviously, that's why he's here, but he's alive. He's human. She hasn't hurt him. She's never, ever hurt him, because apparently, in this world, she's human too.

It's a good life, really. The little red squares stay hidden under her pillow. She doesn't need to be anything else. She just needs to sit in her bed, keep the (delusional) tentacles under her skin, and not. Hurt. Him.

Until one day, CH11101 has a meltdown in the hall right outside her room, and she hears him yelling, _get me out, I want to get out._

She hadn't thought—does he want this life? 

The thought bubbles and grows and writhes inside her, until finally she pulls the squares out from under her pillow and swallows one, thinking, _Set him free._

  


**6\. there's no back— you never left**

—thinking, _Set him free._

The paper is bitter and then ice-cold in her mouth, and then it's gone. Her mouth is open, and she's panting quick breaths of warm air that smells like flowers and water splashed over hot stone. She's kneeling before a pool carved into a floor of white marble. Her hands are braced against the floor, and her skirts are pooled about her in layers of translucent blue silk. Sun beats down on her bare neck. 

"What did you dream, Alice?" It's Maia, the Chief Lady Dreamer, kneeling beside her.

The world shifts inside her head. This is the Temple of Dreams, and she is an acolyte. She was just sent upon her first dream-journey. Now she is to report the visions she found, and they will be recorded and interpreted in the sacred books.

It was all just a dream. Cheshire—all the Cheshires—he was never anything but a symbol.

Alice licks her lips. "I don't remember," she lies.

That night, she silently cries herself to sleep. But when she wakes in the cold, gray hours of morning, her tears have congealed and so has her heart. Perhaps this is for the best. If Cheshire has never been real, then she has never hurt him, and he has never hurt her. If there is no Wonderland, then she cannot miss it, cannot need it. 

She still feels a hollow gape in her chest, but surely all she must do is submerge herself in the quiet rhythms of the Temple. She will have peace again. She will forget to wish for dreams.

She doesn't.

Life at the Temple of Dreams is a gentle dance of prayers and meditation, and Alice is forever off-tempo. When she tends the roses, she remembers pulsing red vials and pipes, as she tore Cheshire's body apart. When she burns incense, she remembers the Caterpillar smoking his hookah. When the moon has waned to a sickle, she thinks of a vanishing grin. 

Alice envies the other acolytes. They do not wake gasping from nightmares; they dream only during meditation, and all their dreams are wise. They all talk in gentle voices about the meanings of their dreams, and how they hope that someday they will have the wisdom to guide the kings and princes who climb the ten thousand stairs to the top of the Spire where the Temple sits among the clouds. They wish for nothing else.

(The kings and princes come more often now—and sages, generals, and desperate children. A dragon is abroad in the world, and Alice's heart skips when she hears the rumors of his terrible, flame-spitting grin. But her dreams are only dreams, and not the least bit wise, and she stifles her doubts.)

Sometimes she hates the other acolytes, for finding peace so easily. The only one she doesn't mind is Izabel, because she also failed at her first dream-journey. They often have duties together—cleaning the kitchens, or arranging flowers for the shrines—and slowly they become something like friends.

"I lied," Izabel says one evening as they sit on the rim of the Spire, their feet dangling out over the abyss. They are the only ones in the temple who dare sit so close to the edge, and their reward is the sunset storm of crimson and gold that looks close enough to touch. "I remember all my dream-journey."

Alice's feels a little curl of hope and fear beneath her heart. "What was it?"

"Another life," says Izabel. "And it was real. I know it was. They say that dreams are the shadows of wisdom—but _it was real._ "

"What happened?" Alice asks carefully.

Izabel tilts her head back, her eyes closed, her mouth curving in a bitter echo of a grin. "I lived in another world, and I made a wish," she said. "And it went wrong. I wanted to protect people, so I fought witches, but in the end I became one." Her voice grows dreamy and distant. "When you're a witch, you lose all hope, and all the world is dancing nonsense. I still see it sometimes, when I close my eyes. Or open them. All because I made a wish."

Then she looks at Alice, and dimples. "So I don't wish now, except for catfish cakes at dinner."

Alice can't speak. She hadn't thought there was anyone else who felt the world was wrong sometimes. She hadn't thought there was anyone who dared to believe in a world besides this one.

She hears the echo of a memory of a dream: _no one's sane behind their mask._

They're friends after that. One day Izabel asks her, "Do you think we're dreaming right now?"

Alice bites her lip. "Maybe," she says. And then, "No."

"Why?" asks Izabel.

"I wasn't dreaming before," says Alice, finally daring to think it. "I know I wasn't, because I hurt somebody, and it _mattered_. So this can't be any less real."

Izabel grins suddenly. "Why not? Have you hurt anyone yet?"

That night, Alice lies awake in her bed. If all her lives are real, then Cheshire is real, and he must be somewhere in this world. Perhaps she can find him. Perhaps they can find Wonderland together.

But with the dawn comes the dragon.

He's bright crimson and he winds through the air like an eel and he destroys the temple in minutes. Only the sanctuary still stands, because inside it floats the Vorpal Blade, and for three thousand years, its power has soaked into the stones. 

"Take the blade," gasps Lady Maia. Her right arm is terribly burnt; she'll be dead in minutes. "Stop him."

Alice takes the blade. Its power settles around her like a cloak, and she holds her head high as she steps outside.

Izabel is already dead. So, quite possibly, is everyone else in the temple. It is time for Alice to avenge them.

Only, when the dragon lands before her and shows his many teeth, she knows his grin and his golden eyes.

_Set him free,_ she had thought.

_I made a wish,_ Izabel had said.

Nothing was more free than a dragon, and nothing was more lonely or more mad, and now everyone was dead.

"You're just a dream," Alice whispers, because that's the only way she can do this.

Snicker-snack. That's all it takes, two slashes with the Vorpal Blade, and the dragon's head is lying at her feet, his silver blood pooling around her, and she's crying desperately, because he's real—or not—and either way, she can't escape. No matter how she dreams or how she wishes, she can't get back to Wonderland and she can't get _him._

Something red floats in the pool of silver. Alice kneels down to pick it up. It's a little string of red squares that say EAT ME.

_That answers the question,_ she thinks, _of dream or not-dream._

She thinks for a long time about all that's happened, and what Izabel said about wishes going wrong. She remembers Cheshire's voice in a smoky bar: _Ask what you really want to ask._

_I want a home for us all,_ she thinks, and eats the little red square.

  


**7\. what's the answer to the riddle**

—never lonely in the drift.

Alice never feels lost there, either. Because Jack Cheshire is right beside her, memories pooling around hers, and all those weird flickers of can't-be-real not-quite-memory? He has them too. A thousand impossible lives whirl around them in the drift, but the two of them balance each other, and Mad Hatter moves through the ocean like a dancer as they attack the Kaiju.

But then comes the Los Angeles Shatterdome, and the sunny afternoon when they're told there's a Category Two headed towards them. Codename: Jabberwock.

It's not a Category Two. It has two heads and five arms and it tears their Jaeger in two. Alice feels the neural bridge snap, and her mind snaps with it.

Alice washes up on the shore. Cheshire doesn't. Two months later, Alice wakes up from the coma and wishes she hadn't.

She's just getting done with physical therapy when they close the Breach. The whole world is cheering, but Alice feels a weird sense of loss. As long as the Breach was open—as long as there was a rabbit-hole out of this world—

Well, people kept dying. And that was bad. But Alice couldn't help feeling like Cheshire might be on the other side. 

That night, there's a strip of little red squares under her pillow. Alice pulls them out and stares at them for a very long time. 

EAT ME, they say. 

_I want to go,_ she thinks.

But she remembers a bit of what happened the last time or five she tried using them. It's often been worse than this.

So she waits. And the next morning, Izabel turns up. They trained together, and then Izabel got deployed to Japan, where she picked up a co-pilot named Misaki and they became one of the best pairs in the war. They probably would have died heroically in the final run on the Breach if their Jaeger hadn't gotten a radiation leak right before everything went down.

"Alice!" says Izabel, and sweeps her into a hug. "I knew you wouldn't be doing anything. Want to come start a cafe with us?"

It turns out that Misaki used to work in a cafe as a teenager, and after drifting through all of her memories, Izabel wants to give it a try.

"And then I thought, who else doesn't have anything to go back to?" says Izabel, who's always had a tenuous connection to tact. But Alice surprises herself by laughing. She's never understood Izabel, but they've both lost everything.

"What sort of cafe?" Alice asks.

Misaki immediately glares at Izabel and says, _"No."_

"But," Izabel protests, "if we have butlers as well, it's not as creepy."

"No," says Misaki.

"Or steampunk," says Izabel, who is forever obsessed with trends fifteen years out of date. "How about steampunk?"

And that's how three Jaeger veterans end up starting Los Angeles's only steampunk cafe. It's not always easy, but Misaki is good with the accounts and—surprisingly—customer service, while Izabel has sixth sense for decorating and promotions. And Alice is . . . learning.

Her mind still feels raw and empty. Every day, more memories slide in around the edges. Now she doesn't just miss Cheshire, doesn't just miss the drift; she misses a hundred Cheshires and a hundred worlds and most of all, she misses Wonderland. The drift was the closest thing she ever found to it, and now it's gone.

Every day she gets up and looks at the half-deconstructed hulk of the Anti-Kaiju Wall. It's hulking, decommissioned, and useless. It feels like her. She thinks of all the hundred thousand human hands that helped lay bricks in it, and then she goes downstairs and helps open up the cafe. She smiles at Izabel and Misaki. She says hello to the customers.

She breathes. And draws leaves in the foam of cappuccinos. A leaf for every brick in the wall. She feels like she's building her own Wall of Life, and maybe it's not the best plan, but without a co-pilot, it's all she can do.

Izabel and Misaki find it equally hard to face a world that's no longer one battle after another. There's some comfort in that. They all have nights when they can't sleep for nightmares, and days when they can hardly drag themselves out of bed, and hours when the absence of the drift is an open wound. And there's nothing any of them can do—except hold each other till they sleep. Drag them out of bed. Make coffee. Smile for the customers. Smile for each other. Breathe. Live.

Sometimes they end up crushed in a triple hug, pressed close enough to hear each other's heartbeats. It's not the drift—without a neural handshake, the silence between them is absolute and forever—but across the gulf, their hearts beat out a steady, relentless Morse code: _I'm alive. So are you._

One cold, foggy morning, Alice takes the little red squares out of her pocket and stares at them. She remembers enough now to be very sure what they can do. There are other worlds. Other chances.

_There's no back,_ Cheshire has told her in several lives.

She remembers Izabel's other self, talking about wishes.

Alice takes out a cigarette lighter, takes a deep breath, and burns all the little red squares.

And then she goes downstairs, and makes coffee.

  


**8\. leaving nothing but a grin**

It's a golden afternoon in late October. There are gulls squawking among the tables outside; inside, Izabel is taking orders while Misaki works the espresso machine. She's also glowering and blushing at the same time, because Takumi has turned up to order coffee for his whole office again. He's their latest regular, and his hobbies include running a multinational company and flirting with Misaki. Despite the frequent yelling Alice suspects that at some day she's going to come into work and discover they've eloped to Vegas.

Alice is clearing the tables when she looks up and sees him in the door. Leather jacket, tight jeans, sunglasses—it's his favorite outfit, and she knows it can't be him, but she still can't look away.

He steps inside, and she feels the flicker of the ghost-drift between them.

The next moment she's in his arms. "You," she chokes out. "You died."

His grin is exactly how she remembers. "I did," he says. "And I didn't. And you did too."

The words send a thrill of memory through her. She reaches up and pulls off his sunglasses.

Golden cat-eyes look back at her.

Her heart stutters. She pulls back a little and asks carefully, "Are you the one I drifted with?"

"Are you?" he asks.

For a moment they look at each other in silence.

And she knows: this is him. All of him. She doesn't know if he's been wandering through worlds while she stayed here, or if he's been dreaming in a coma, but somehow he has gathered all his pieces together, as she has gathered all of hers.

And now they are ready to start. Alice lets out a shuddering breath and then they are hugging each other like they're holding the world together.

Outside the circle of his arms, Izabel has noticed him and started shrieking. There are going to be explanations. And things that can't be explained. And there will be long, long years of exile, because Alice burned all their chances to leave. They are neither of them going back to Wonderland.

The words float between them in the ghost-drift: _There's no back. You never left._

And right here, right now, this is their home.

(It's nothing like a writing-desk at all.)

**Author's Note:**

> Because somebody pointed out I was being needlessly cryptic, here's a quick guide to the crossovers. Izabel is a witch from the anime _Puella Magi Madoka Magica._ (She's not named in the anime, only in the [promotional materials](http://wiki.puella-magi.net/Izabel).) Misaki and Takumi are the main characters from the manga/anime _Maid Sama!_ , and I feel a little bad I didn't let them pilot a Jaeger together, but that's what the plot demanded. The Jaegers themselves, of course, are from _Pacific Rim_. All other worlds are of my own devising.


End file.
